Hello and welcome to navel-gazing. I'm John Dickerson.

Notebook 75, page 12, September 2021.

Notebooks to Garrett.

Well, we started this episode right away, didn't we, notebook entry right away. No preliminaries,

no throat clearing, no self-indulgent jokes about the Greeks, no rumination on the start of things,

just a brisk plunge into the icy waters of recollection. In this notebook of our present

concern, yellow-covered field notes held together by blue

painters' tape, there was, you'll remember, from the last episode, a to-do list. This occasioned a

conversation about the to-do list and its role in ordering or towsling the hair of our

modern life.

Next in the notebook, it contains another long to-do list, but this one is specifically related

to the tasks of the apartment move across town.

The very top entry is this one, Notebooks to Garrett.

Its placement befits the priority that that specific

task had. Garrett is the name I gave to my office in the attic of our new house, where I am coming to

you now over the wireless. I say I gave it that name. A more precise description is that over time,

as I nested in the cell, I learned how fitting

that name is for this place. I give you Wikipedia. A garret is a habitable attic, a living space at the

top of a house, traditionally small with sloping ceilings. In the days before elevators, this was the

least prestigious position in the building

at the very top of the stairs. And verily, the garret is what you reach when you walk all the way

up our stairway. It is on the fourth floor of our house, which still lives in the days before

...